Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study initiated by the potential employment of readability measures to assess the equivalence of reading ease and grade level indices between source texts and their translations as well as back-renderings. It was questionable whether there was a causal relation between the indices and their comprehensibility levels, because whereas the former concentrated merely on quantities of linguistic elements and their formal relations, the latter considered such factors as particular characteristics of each element, meaning coverage, and readers’ socio-psychological background. This study aimed to disclose the relation between the readability measures and the comprehensibility levels of source texts and their translations, as well as back-renderings. A number of English texts, along with their translations in Indonesian, were deliberately chosen for that purpose. The translations were then back-rendered to the source language utilizing Google Translate. Comparison between the source texts and their translations as well as back-renderings was capable of showing their similarities in the readability levels and average number of characters, words, sentences, and words per sentence in the texts. And asking prospective readers about their perception concerning their understanding of such texts was capable of disclosing the causal relation between the readability and the comprehensibility levels of the texts.

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